Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) and Fenton John
Anthony Hort (1828-1892) have been highly controversial figures in biblical
history.

We cannot blindly accept the finding of any
scholar without investigating what his beliefs are concerning the Bible and
its doctrines. Scholarship alone makes for an inadequate and dangerous
authority, therefore we are forced to scrutinize these men's lives.

A Monumental Switch

Photo to Left: Fenton John Anthony
Hort (1828-1892)

Westcott and Hort were responsible for the
greatest feat in textual criticism. They were responsible for replacing the
Universal Text of the Authorized Version with the Local Text of Egypt and the
Roman Catholic Church. Both Westcott and Hort were known to have resented the
pre-eminence given to the Authorized Version and its underlying Greek Text.
They had been deceived into believing that the Roman Catholic manuscripts,
Vaticanus and Aleph, were better because they were "older."

Vicious Prejudice

In spite of the FACT that the readings of the
Universal Text were found to be as old, or older, Westcott and Hort still
sought to dislodge it from its place of high standing in biblical history.

Westcott and Hort built their own Greek text
based primarily on a few uncial MSS of the Local Text. It has been stated
earlier that these perverted MSS do not even agree among themselves. The
ironic thing is that Westcott and Hort knew this when they formed their text!

A Shocking Revelation

That these men should lend their influence to a
family of MSS which have a history of attacking and diluting the major
doctrines of the Bible, should not come as a surprise. Oddly enough, neither
man believed that the Bible should be treated any differently than the
writings of the lost historians and philosophers!

Hort wrote, "For ourselves, we dare not introduce
considerations which could not reasonably be applied to other ancient texts,
supposing them to have documentary attestation of equal amount, variety and
antiquity."

We must consider these things for a moment. How
can God use men who do not believe that His Book is any different than
Shakespeare, Plato, or Dickens? It is a fundamental belief that the Bible is
different from all other writings. Why did these men not believe so?

Blatant Disbelief

Their skepticism does, in fact, go even deeper.
They have both become famous for being able to deny scriptural truth and still
be upheld by fundamental Christianity as biblical authorities! Both Westcott
and Hort failed to accept the basic Bible doctrines which we hold so dear and
vital to our fundamental faith.

Furthermore, he took sides with the apostate
authors of "Essays and Reviews."

Hort writes to Rev. Rowland Williams, October 21,
1858, "Further I agree with them [Authors of "Essays and Reviews"] in
condemning many leading specific doctrines of the popular theology ...
Evangelicals seem to me perverted rather than untrue. There are, I fear, still
more serious differences between us on the subject of authority, and
especially the authority of the Bible."

We must also confront Hort's disbelief that the
Bible was infallible: "If you make a decided conviction of the absolute
infallibility of the N.T. practically a sine qua non for co-operation, I fear
I could not join you." He also stated:

"As I was writing the last words a note came
from Westcott. He too mentions having had fears, which he now pronounces
'groundless,' on the strength of our last conversation, in which he
discovered that I did 'recognize' 'Providente' in biblical writings. Most
strongly I recognize it; but I am not prepared to say that it necessarily
involves absolute infallibility. So I still await judgment."

And further commented to a colleague:

"But I am not able to go as far as you in
asserting the absolute infallibility of a canonical writing."

Strange Bedfellows

Though unimpressed with the evangelicals of his
day, Hort had great admiration for Charles Darwin! To his colleague, B.F.
Westcott, he wrote excitedly: "...Have you read Darwin? How I should like to
talk with you about it! In spite of difficulties, I am inclined to think it
unanswerable. In any case it is a treat to read such a book."

And to John Ellerton he writes: "But the book
which has most engaged me is Darwin. Whatever may be thought of it, it is a
book that one is proud to be contemporary with ... My feeling is strong that
the theory is unanswerable. If so, it opens up a new period."

Forsaking Colossians 2:8

Hort was also a lover of Greek philosophy. In
writing to Mr. A. MacMillian, he stated: "You seem to make (Greek) philosophy
worthless for those who have received the Christian revelation. To me, though
in a hazy way, it seems full of precious truth of which I find nothing, and
should be very much astonished and perplexed to find anything in revelation."

Lost in the Forest

In some cases Hort seemed to wander in the woods.
In others he can only be described as utterly "lost in the forest." Take, for
example, his views on fundamental Bible truths.

Hort's "Hell"

Rev. Hort also shrunk from the belief in a
literal, eternal "hell."

"I think Maurice's letter to me sufficiently
showed that we have no sure knowledge respecting the duration of future
punishment, and that the word 'eternal' has a far higher meaning than the
merely material one of excessively long duration; extinction always grates
against my mind as something impossible."

"Certainly in my case it proceeds from no
personal dread; when I have been living most godlessly, I have never been
able to frighten myself with visions of a distant future, even while I
'held' the doctrine."

Hort's "Purgatory'

Although the idea of a literal devil and a
literal hell found no place in Hort's educated mind, he was a very real
believer in the fictitious Roman Catholic doctrine of "purgatory." To Rev. John
Ellerton he wrote in 1854:

"I agree with you in thinking it a pity that
Maurice verbally repudiates purgatory, but I fully and unwaveringly agree
with him in the three cardinal points of the controversy: (1) that eternity
is independent of duration; (2) that the power of repentance is not limited
to this life; (3) that it is not revealed whether or not all will ultimately
repent. The modern denial of the second has, I suppose, had more to do with
the despiritualizing of theology then almost anything that could be named."

Also while advising a young student he wrote:

"The idea of purgation, of cleansing as by
fire, seems to me inseparable from what the Bible teaches us of the Divine
chastisements; and, though little is directly said respecting the future
state, it seems to me incredible that the Divine chastisements should in
this respect change their character when this visible life is ended.

"I do not hold it contradictory to the Article
to think that the condemned doctrine has not been wholly injurious, inasmuch
as it has kept alive some sort of belief in a great and important truth."

Thus we see that Dr. Hort's opinions were
certainly not inhibited by orthodoxy. Yet his wayward ways do not end here.
For, as his own writings display, Dr. Hort fell short in several other
fundamental areas.

Hort's "Atonement"

There was also his rejection of Christ's atoning
death for the sins of all mankind.

"The fact is, I do not see how God's justice
can be satisfied without every man's suffering in his own person the full
penalty for his sins."

In fact, Hort considered the teachings of
Christ's atonement as heresy!

"Certainly nothing can be more unscriptural
than the modern limiting of Christ's bearing our sins and sufferings to His
death; but indeed that is only one aspect of an almost universal heresy."

The fact is, that Hort believed Satan more
worthy of accepting Christ's payment for sins than God.

"I confess I have no repugnance to the
primitive doctrine of a ransom paid to Satan, though neither am I prepared
to give full assent to it. But I can see no other possible form in which the
doctrine of a ransom is at all tenable; anything is better than the notion
of a ransom paid to the Father."

Hort's "Baptism"

Dr. Hort also believed that the Roman Catholic
teaching of "baptismal regeneration" was more correct than the "evangelical"
teaching.

"...at the same time in language stating that
we maintain 'Baptismal Regeneration' as the most important of doctrines ...
the pure 'Romish' view seems to me nearer, and more likely to lead to, the
truth than the Evangelical."

He also states that, "Baptism assures us that we
are children of God, members of Christ and His body, and heirs of the heavenly
kingdom."

In fact, Hort's heretical view of baptism
probably cost his own son his eternal soul, as we find Hort assuring his
eldest son, Arthur, that his infant baptism was his salvation:

"You were not only born into the world of men.
You were also born of Christian parents in a Christian land. While yet an
infant you were claimed for God by being made in Baptism an unconscious
member of His Church, the great Divine Society which has lived on
unceasingly from the Apostles' time till now. You have been surrounded by
Christian influences; taught to lift up your eyes to the Father in heaven as
your own Father; to feel yourself in a wonderful sense a member or part of
Christ, united to Him by strange invisible bonds; to know that you have as
your birthright a share in the kingdom of heaven."

Hort's Twisted Belief

Along with Hort's unregenerated misconceptions of
basic Bible truths, there were his quirkish and sometimes quackish personal
beliefs.

It is not an amazing thing that any one man could
hold to so many unscriptural and ungodly beliefs. It is amazing that such a
man could be exalted by Bible believing preachers and professors to a point of
authority higher than the King James Bible! Dr. Hort was a truly great Greek
scholar, yet a great intellect does not make one an authority over the Bible
when they themselves do not even claim to believe it! Albert Einstein was a
man of great intellect, but he rejected Scripture, and so where he speaks on
the subject of Scripture he is not to be accepted as authoritative. Possessing
a great mind or great ability does not guarantee being a great spiritual
leader. Dr. Hort was a scholar, but his scholarship alone is no reason to
accept his theories concerning Bible truth.

If fundamental pastors of today enlisted the
services of an evangelist and found that this evangelist had beliefs
paralleling those of Fenton John Anthony Hort, I believe that the pastor would
cancel the meeting. Strangely through, when a pastor discovers such to
be true about Dr. Hort, he excuses him as "a great Greek scholar" and presents
his Authorized Version to him to be maliciously dissected and then discarded
as Dr. Hort sets himself down in the seat of authority which the Bible once
held. Here again I must assert that most often this is done with childlike
faith on the part of the pastor, due to the education he received while in
seminary. The seminary is not really guilty either, for they have simply and
unsuspectingly accepted the authority of two men raised under the influence of
a campaign by the Jesuits to re-Romanize England.

Problems with Westcott

Unfortunately for the "new Bible" supporters, Dr.
Westcott's credentials are even more anti-biblical. Westcott did not
believe that Genesis 1-3 should be taken literally. He also thought that
"Moses" and "David" were poetic characters whom Jesus Christ referred to by
name only because the common people accepted them as authentic. Westcott
states:

"No one now, I suppose, holds that the first
three chapters of Genesis, for example, give a literal history - I could
never understand how anyone reading them with open eyes could think they did
- yet they disclose to us a Gospel. So it is probably elsewhere. Are we not
going through a trial in regard to the use of popular language on literary
subjects like that through which we went, not without sad losses in regard
to the use of popular language on physical subjects? If you feel now that it
was, to speak humanly, necessary that the Lord should speak of the 'sun
rising,' it was no less necessary that he would use the names 'Moses' and
'David' as His contemporaries used them. There was no critical question at
issue. (Poetry is, I think, a thousand times more true than History; this is
a private parenthesis for myself alone.)"

He also said "David" is not a chronological but a
spiritual person.

That the first three chapter of Genesis are
all allegory has been believed by liberals and modernists for years. Do
today's fundamentalists realize that those modernists' beliefs were nurtures
in the heart of this Bible critic?

Westcott was also a doubter of the biblical
account of miracles: "I never read an account of a miracle but I seem
instinctively to feel its improbability, and discover somewhat of evidence in
the account of it." 18 If a great fundamental preacher of our day were to make
this statement, he would be called apostate, but what then of Westcott?

Westcott believed that the second coming of
Jesus Christ was not a physical coming but a spiritual coming: "As far as I
can remember, I said very shortly what I hold to be the 'Lord's coming' in my
little book on the Historic Faith. I hold very strongly that the Fall of
Jerusalem was the coming which first fulfilled the Lord's words; and, as there
have been other comings, I cannot doubt that He is 'coming' to us now."

Westcott's "Heaven"

Wait! This fundamental doctrine is not the
last one to be denied by Bishop Westcott, for he believed Heaven to be a state
and not a literal place. Note the following quotations from Bishop
Westcott: "No doubt the language of the Rubric is unguarded, but it saves us
from the error of connecting the Presence of Christ's glorified humanity with
place; 'heaven is a state and not a place.'" 20

"We may reasonably hope, by patient,
resolute, faithful, united endeavor to find heaven about us here, the glory
of our earthly life."

These are the convictions of a man greatly
responsible for the destruction of Christian faith in the Greek Text of the
Authorized Version. Place Mr. Westcott next to any present fundamental
preacher or educator, and he would be judged a modernist, liberal and heretic.
In spite of his outstanding ability in Greek, a man of his convictions would
not be welcome on the campus of any truly Christian college in America. This
is not an overstatement, nor is it malicious. The Christian colleges of today
hold very high standards and simply would not settle for a man of such
apostate conviction, no matter how great his ability to teach a given subject.

Westcott and Hort were two non-Christian
Anglican ministers. Fully steeped in the Alexandrian philosophy that "there is
no perfect Bible", they had a vicious distaste for the King James Bible and
its Antiochian Greek text, the Textus Receptus.

Both believed that Heaven existed only in
the mind of man.

Both believed it possible to communicate with the dead and made many attempts
to do just that through a society which they organized and entitled "The
Ghostly Guild."

Westcott accepted and promoted prayers for the dead.

Both were admirers of Mary (Westcott going so far as to call his wife Sarah, "Mary"), and
Hort was an admirer and proponent of Darwin and his theory of evolution.

It is obvious to even a casual observer why they were well equipped to guide
the Revision Committee of 1871-1881 away from God's Antiochian text and into
the spell of Alexandria.

They had compiled their own Greek text from Alexandrian manuscripts, which,
though unpublished and inferior to the Textus Receptus, they secreted little
by little to the Revision Committee. The result being a totally new
Alexandrian English Bible instead of a "revision" of the Authorized Version as
it was claimed to be.

It has only been in recent years that scholars have examined their unbalanced
theories concerning manuscript history and admitted that their agreements were
weak to non-existent.

Sadly, both men died having never known the joy and peace of claiming Jesus
Christ as their Saviour.